This study presents the integrated results of stable carbon (δ13C) and nitrogen (δ15N) isotope and aDNA analyses, conducted to examine dietary and mobility practices in two mid- to late Byzantine communities in western Anatolia: the coastal cosmopolitan site of Kadıkalesi Anaia and the rural inland settlement of Barcın Höyük. Isotopic data from thirty-eight individuals indicate that both populations primarily consumed terrestrial C₃-based resources. At Kadıkalesi, δ15N values show greater variability, suggesting more differentiated access to animal protein sources, whereas the rural community at Barcın Höyük exhibits isotopic homogeneity, consistent with more uniform dietary practices and an equitable access to food. Kadıkalesi also shows intra-site dietary variation by age and sex, while Barcın is again more homogeneous. At Barcın, aDNA results indicate a predominant local genetic continuity, suggesting a stable population; a single instance of external ancestry is attested by a male individual with affinities to western populations, particularly from eastern Europe, in line with historical military resettlement patterns (stratiotika ktemata). By integrating isotopic and genomic evidence, this study demonstrates how ancestry and mobility shaped dietary habits, offering insights into the interplay of urbanism, mobility, and social organization in the Byzantine period.

Digital health services in Kenya comprise mobile health applications (mHealth apps), electronic health records, telehealth and telemedicine, which form part of an expanding digital health assemblage. These are shaped by transnational development agendas and donor-driven public health interventions. This paper discusses the for-profit turn in the digitalisation of health care – what I term the ‘appisation’ of health – as a site of intensified commodification where users are reconfigured as digitised health consumers. While other scholars have argued that digitalisation functions as extractive in deepening market penetration into spheres of life we rely on, I extend these arguments by claiming that, far from enhancing access, these technologies exploit vulnerabilities through opaque governance mechanisms and algorithmic decision-making, while transferring responsibility for health from the state to the individual, thus creating new dependencies on market-mediated platforms. Using discursive interface analysis of two health apps in Kenya, I examine how consumer health apps embed vulnerabilities while consumer law remains structurally limited in confronting the collective harms they generate.

This article examines the negotiation of ethnopolitical categories in wartime Nazi Germany by analyzing Gestapo investigations into accusations of “friendliness to Poland” against German citizens of Polish descent in the industrial Ruhr conurbation. By relying heavily on denunciations and informing, the Gestapo incentivized ordinary Germans in the Ruhr to identify perceived “dangerous outsiders” to the Volksgemeinschaft. Some therefore relied on longstanding anti-Polish tropes to frame accusations in the racial categories of the Nazi state. But while many such accusations alerted the Gestapo’s attention, they frequently masked a pursuit of personal issues and presented officers with significant investigatory difficulties. Unlike the generally brutal treatment of ethnolinguistic minorities in Nazi Germany, Gestapo officers often did not simply employ blanket repression in these cases. They frequently considered accused individuals’ socioeconomic productivity and “commitment” to Germany, characteristics that defendants stressed, thus highlighting the often contingent, unstable process of ethnic boundary formation in Nazi Germany.

After introducing the topic of antifascism on the internet and the issues that scientific publications encounter when facing the web, the first part of this contribution in Contexts and Debates examined the first of three digital history projects connected to this topic, the Atlante delle stragi naziste e fasciste. In this following section, the attention is focused on two more publications: IF – Intellettuali in fuga dall’Italia fascista, a project tied to the issue of mobility for people persecuted by the Fascist regime; and Memorie in Cammino, a project that approaches its content and the user’s interaction with it in an entirely non-linear manner, reconstructing the lives and actions of those who resisted the regime.

The memoir of Shadrack Byfield, an English weaver and war amputee, occupies a privileged place in the historiography and public memory of the Anglo‑American War of 1812. Yet relatively little is known about the author of this rare rank-and-file account. Drawing on extensive archival research and a newly discovered second autobiography, this article challenges the familiar image of Byfield as a plainspoken exemplar of military stoicism. It reveals how war in North America transformed the former private soldier both physically and psychologically. Examining Byfield’s return to civilian life, the article highlights his tenacious pursuit of veterans’ benefits, his cultivation of influential patrons, and his invention of a prosthetic device to enable a resumption of weaving work. It also traces the ex‑serviceman’s path to publication and explores his shifting self‑presentation in print—first as a dutiful soldier and later as a redeemed sinner. Integrating scholarship on disability, memoirs, military welfare, and the history of emotions, the article argues that Byfield’s exceptionally well‑documented life offers a window into the wider experiences of Britain’s homecoming soldiers after the Napoleonic Wars.

This article discusses the modalities of visual necropolitics in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Drawing on the concepts of necropolitics (Mbembe 2003), visual necropolitics (Deprez 2023), and insights into everyday forms of violence and subjugation, this article argues that the necropolitics of Russia’s war on Ukraine manifests itself in the form of physical but also social death. Relying on the method of visual semiotic analysis, it identifies two key modalities of visual necropolitics: manipulation of representations and a forceful imposition of a new identity. In doing so, it contributes to the literatures on necropolitics of war and the lived experiences of peoples and communities living under occupation.

The article charts the changing fortunes of the Catholics of Lisburn, County Antrim from 1914–22. It begins by exploring the establishment of a local battalion of the Irish National Volunteers and analysing Catholic recruitment to the war effort, before turning to the Easter Rising (1916), its aftermath and the bitter sectarian riots of August 1920, following the assassination of RIC District Inspector Swanzy. This murder in the centre of Lisburn led to days of violence and forced many of the town’s Catholics to flee. This paper argues that relations between nationalists and unionists in the 1914–22 period should be understood in the context of unionist beliefs regarding their communal safety and that territorial security is key to understanding the presence and form of violence in the town during the Swanzy Riots. Finally, some consideration is given to how this case study of Lisburn offers insight into understanding communal violence elsewhere in Ireland, during the wartime and revolutionary period.

HIV/AIDS posed a significant health threat in Denmark from the early 1980s until the end of the 1990s, claiming approximately 2,000 lives. Gay men, hemophiliacs, drug users, sex workers and migrants were overwhelmingly among the victims of the disease. They also constituted the groups most associated with it. This led to a raised level of public attention to these groups; a heightened visibility that ambiguously resulted both in improving the life conditions of some while also increasing the stigma of others. This article analyses the roles of different cross-sector actors in shaping the responses to HIV/AIDS in Denmark, with each group influencing and being influenced by the epidemic. Yet despite the clear connection between HIV/AIDS and the minoritized, often marginalized, groups, the article argues that the overarching and dominant response objective during the crisis in Denmark was to prevent a heterosexual epidemic. Throughout the crisis, other responses, aims and objectives concerning the groups most affected by HIV/AIDS could be, and did become, contingent with this dominant objective. The strengths and positions of those subresponses depended on, however, the perceptions of them as logical and tangible means to the primary end of preventing the heterosexual epidemic. Pulling together different and changing responses from different and changing actors serves to crystallize what objectives or logics are the mutual ones, and the significance of this analysis is that what appeared to be a very heterogeneous set of responses to the disease in Denmark, was in fact rooted in the same objective. Notably, the perceived pertinence of preventing the heterosexual epidemic was not rooted in actual rates of infection or spread of the disease.

This article explores the strategic (mis)use of historical memory by populist political actors, focusing on George Simion, leader of the Romanian radical-right party Alliance for the Unity of Romanians. Through a detailed case study of the Valea Uzului Cemetery controversy, the research examines how populist movements construct and disseminate exclusionary historical narratives to mobilize affective publics, reinforce nationalistic ideologies, and generate political support. Drawing on qualitative analysis of Facebook comments and posts, the study investigates how memory is weaponized to polarize public opinion and elevate a simplified, antagonistic vision of history. The Valea Uzului case exemplifies how war cemeteries and commemorative practices can be transformed into symbolic battlegrounds for political gain. The digital environment serves as a key vector for radicalization, emotional amplification, and narrative reinforcement. Ultimately, this research highlights the critical role of memory in populist politics and the power of social media in shaping historical perception. It calls for further comparative investigation into how such mnemonic strategies impact democratic processes, interethnic relations, and the broader politics of remembrance in contemporary Europe.

The Pinel Sanatorium, the brainchild of Doctor Antonio Carlos Pacheco e Silva, a leading figure in Brazilian psychiatry, was inaugurated in 1929 in São Paulo as a private institution. It operated until 1944, during which time it recorded approximately 4,500 hospitalisations. In 30 psychiatric records, in addition to the usual clinical records, such as the Psychiatric Examination – in which the doctor records the elements he deems essential for identifying the mental illness from different sources of information, such as those provided by family members – attachments were found containing letters and short texts written by the inpatients. Addressed to different people, these letters, which were retained and evaluated by the doctors, played a central role in assessing the psychiatric conditions of the inmates. However, by being considered historical sources that reveal the ‘point of view’ of the mad, these documents are fundamental to the development of innovative approaches in the field of the history of madness and psychiatry. Based on the articulation between the context in which these records were produced, the social markers of difference that constitute the subjects, as well as the emotions expressed by the people who wrote them, the article sets out to answer two questions: (1) How the emotions expressed – both by the inmates and by their loved ones – were interpreted by psychiatrists and used to formulate diagnoses, and to define treatments and prognoses; (2) What meanings these emotions took on for the inmates themselves, in other words, how they put their experiences and subjectivities on display.

This paper concerns the difficulty of avoiding an additive version of the Very Repugnant Conclusion. An impossibility theorem is provided which shows that we cannot avoid this version of the Repugnant Conclusion even if we deny the Mere Addition Principle and closely related principles which place limits on the badness of adding happy people, such as “Dominance Addition” and additive “Non-Sadism” conditions. I argue that the impossibility theorem shows that the additive version of the Very Repugnant Conclusion cannot reasonably be avoided by population-ethical means alone. One must instead either deny structural conditions such as acyclicity, adopt a radically unorthodox fixed-population axiology, or accept this version of the Very Repugnant Conclusion.

Stanley N. Katz served as the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor of the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University from 1978 to 1986. He left to become President of the American Council of Learned Societies, the national humanities organization in the United States. When he stepped down from that position in 1997, he returned to teaching and high-level institutional service at Princeton, including as the Acting Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs from 2004 to 05 and 2016 to 17. Katz’s contributions to legal history include, in addition to a vast array of articles and the books cited in the footnotes below, his work as Editor in Chief of the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History and of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the United States Supreme Court. He has served as President of the Organization of American Historians and American Society for Legal History, as Vice President of the Research Division of the American Historical Association, and as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Newberry Library, the Center for Jewish History, and many other institutions. He is a Fellow of the American Society for Legal History, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Society of American Historians. President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal in 2011.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine holds two collections by Adolf Nichtenhauser (1903–53) that have become important sources for historians of medical and health films: an unpublished book-manuscript in which he surveys the history of medical and health films to around 1950, primarily in Europe and North America; and the valuable collection of documents he amassed partly during his research for this book-manuscript. Such is the richness of these collections that it is difficult to imagine a history of medical and health film that is not in some way indebted to Nichtenhauser. Indeed, his book-manuscript has become a standard citation in the historiography of medicine, health and film. Yet very little is known about Nichtenhauser himself, other than that he was a European immigrant to the United States who wrote this key history and died before its completion. This article seeks to do three things: to provide the first English-language biography of Nichtenhauser from his early life in Austria to his career in the United States; to use this biography to explain how he came to write this book-manuscript; and to explore the relationship between his historiography and efforts in the 1940s and 1950s to identify and solve problems with application of film to medicine and health.

In this article, I discuss the inadequacy of the solution to the problem of evil in a God-created world proposed by the African perfect God theists, Kwame Gyekye and Ebunoluwa Oduwole, and highlight the success of the limited God framework of Kwasi Wiredu, J.A.I. Bewaji, and the Chimakonams in accounting for the evil in the world. However, implicit in the limitation thesis is the claim that God did his best at the time he created the world, such that the evil in it cannot be further reduced to allow for a better world. I argue that the limited God view offers a good reason to believe that a limited God can reduce the evil in the world and make it better, once the deity is conceived as a sufficiently powerful, knowledgeable, and good being with the capacity for continuous improvement within the bounds of limitation.

The introduction and use of digital contact tracing apps as part of pandemic management have notably raised many legal and ethical challenges, ranging from determinations of public interest in using gathered data to privacy protections for app users and broader considerations of national socio-economic priorities. As the use of these digital contact tracing apps is supported by laws, legal preparedness is essential in determining appropriate legal authority that considers necessary trade-offs such as temporary privacy infringements, proportional data gathering and collective public health benefits. This paper examines the extent of legal preparedness in addressing competing interests between public health and individuals in the use of digital contact tracing apps. It does so through two main lenses: (1) an analysis of Singapore’s legal framework pertaining to data protection, privacy and contact tracing apps and (2) an analysis of the domestic social and political influences that explain why Singapore’s approach to digital contact tracing was viable, and assess its potential or limits for broader applicability.